Recently, I encountered a use case of crossover domain that worth blogging about. The concept of crossover domain is simple. It is a way to trigger something to happen when an attribute is being populated. That something is to copy one or more attributes from a related object to the current object that is involved in the operation at this moment. For example, you want to “crossover” the item’s description when you are putting the item on the purchase order that you are creating. Crossover domain is a... [More]

Do you need a quick way to determine what customizations you’ve made to your Maximo Asset Management 7.5 installation? If so, check out the Customization Detection tool. The tool currently works on Maximo Asset Management Version 7.5.0.0 and higher. The tool provides information about customizations for business objects, field classes, and services that were customized (extended/added) for the out-of-the-box system. It does not provide information about UI bean classes or other configuration changes. For information about the tool... [More]

Conditional UI is a powerful tool that can change the behavior of your user interfaces based on the state of the current record or the role of an individual user. See the Application Configuration Best Practices page for more details on what Conditional UI can do for your users. To implement some conditional user interface use cases, Maximo 7.x allows you to conditionally change the property values of your widgets. This is controlled in the Application Designer application by launching the “Configure Conditional... [More]

I need to set limits when faced with these. Knows as Fluffernutters, smooth, decadent peanut butter and sticky marshmallow topping on plain white bread form the ultimate comfort sandwich. With a cold glass of milk, the number I can toss down is crazy high. You may also need to stop your users from over-indulging by setting records limits when they create Ad Hoc or QBR (Query Based Reports.) The creation process of ad hoc reporting is where users select the fields, application query, sorting and grouping that they... [More]

Even though in the out-of-the-box configuration, the LONGDESCRIPTION table and its LDTEXT field are audit enabled, it does not mean all objects’ Long Description fields are audit enabled. For audit records to be generated for a specific object’s Long Description field, you need to set the object as well as its DESCRIPTION_LONGDESCRIPTION field to audit-enabled. For example, if you'd like to audit the ASSET table's Long Description field, these steps need to be... [More]

Sometimes customers add customized code to make WebService call from MaximoUIWeb module. WebSrervice call might interfear with xerces.jar file included in BIRT engine. Usually users will get an exception like "java.lang.ClassCastException: org.apache.xerces.parsers.XIncludeAwareParserConfiguration incompatible with org.apache.xerces.xni.parser.XMLParserConfiguration". This can be resolved by adding org.apache.axis.utils.XMLUtils.initSAXFactory(null, true, true) just before making the WebService call.

I have an unwarranted fear of bridges. I attacked this fear head-on last week and forced myself to walk over a beautiful bridge in Portland, Oregon while attending the stellar MUWG conference. My legs were unsteady and my mind continually meandered to the rust surrounding me – but I eventually claimed victory on the other side of the Williamette River. To minimize your meandering while looking for Maximo Report documentation, a new, downloadable spreadsheet has been prepared for you.... [More]

Stuart Bowden (IBM UK) and Sampath Sriramadhesikan (IBM US) contributed to this article. Introduction APAR IZ88552 brought about some functionality in Maximo to handle email with a content type of 'message' (i.e. RFC 822 content). Two-and-a-half years later is not too late to clarify what this feature entails. Maximo, nor the JavaMail API, are capable of encoding or decoding proprietary message formats. The Outlook message format is a proprietary binary encoded format. 1) The value of the... [More]

Can you imagine life without numbers? What time would we meet for coffee? How much would the coffee cost, how many ounces would it be and how would you text me if you were going to be late? Depending on your morning or evening perspective….coffee may be the least of our worries in a life with no numbers. But there is no doubt that numbers are critical in identifying supported software versions! As noted here , Maximo’s Open Reporting Architecture enables you to use your reporting tool of choice thru the embedded... [More]

"Before you can race, you must qualify". As a fan of Motorsports (Formula 1 in particular) I hear this phrase on many weekends throughout the season. The phrase basically means that to have the highest chance of being successful in an endeavor you must prepare adequately. In this article I shall take this same idea and show you how to apply it to a successful Maximo installation. If "qualifying" is preparing for a race then careful planning of your IBM Maximo Administrative Workstation is along the same lines. Many of us... [More]

Many times Application servers are restrated because of different reasons. If an application server is executing scheduled reports while the system is restarted then those reports will not re-execute automatically. To avoid that condition scheduled reports are rescheduled to run when report framework thinks that there is no activity on a report for 15 minutes. Report framework thinks that there is no activity on a report when a report SQL runs for more than 15 minutes or the report renders for more than 15 minutes. If a report SQL runs for 15... [More]